Este informe discute intentos iniciales por cultivar maíz con el uso de agua procedente de Hierve el Agua, y también evalúa los análisis de agua y los datos palinológicos disponibles en las terrazas de dicho sitio. La discusión se extiende también a la toxicidad de boro en el sitio, así como al origen de los minerales disueltos en el agua. Urge cooperación entre instituciones de México y en los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica con el motivo de experimentar con el cultivo de plantas en Hierve el Agua.

In the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, the term cerrito was traditionally used to designate archaeological phenomena that emerge in the form of mounds in different landscapes. Except for recent research developed in the southwestern region of the Patos Lagoon, few advances have occurred since the 1980s in the study of cerritos in Brazil. This article presents an analysis of the lithic industries of sites with mounds in the southwestern region of the Patos Lagoon and in the central region in the current territory of Rio Grande do Sul. The results, along with other data from the sites, suggest that coastal sites were occupied by sedentary fisher-hunter-gatherers, who also possibly domesticated certain plants. Lithic material was scarce there and was mainly produced from pebbles and quartz cobbles using the anvil technique. In contrast, central region formations presented mounds on outcrops, using land, pebbles, and boulders; the area was occupied by a hunter-gatherer group that had projectile points and other instruments carved mainly by façonnage and débitage.

Recent archaeological fieldwork on Isla de Mona in the Caribbean has led to the discovery of a substantial corpus of early colonial inscriptions inside the darkzone of one of the 200 cave systems on the island. Cave 18, like multiple others on Isla de Mona, was a well-established indigenous spiritual realm in the centuries leading up to European colonization. Christian symbols, individual names, written dates, and Spanish and Latin religious commentaries are located in direct association with preexisting indigenous iconography and activities. This paper applies paleographic (handwriting) analysis to establish the authenticity, authorship, and chronology of the inscriptions and to interpret the nature of this early spiritual encounter. We conclude that these sixteenth-century inscriptions represent visits to the cave by first-generation Europeans, including Spanish royal officials in Puerto Rico, and reflect their reactions to native religious landscapes. The inscriptions on Isla de Mona capture personal, face-to-face encounters with native religion and represent Christian commentaries and reactions to indigenous spaces and worldview in the early colonial period.

El presente trabajo tiene como finalidad caracterizar al tipo cerámico Thin Plain con base en materiales cerámicos obtenidos recientemente en el sitio arqueológico Chak Pet de Altamira, Tamaulipas. Esta cerámica, reportada por autores clásicos de la Huaxteca, se caracteriza por una mayor resistencia a la fractura y antiplásticos consistentes en fragmentos de cerámica molida de los tipos Prisco Negro y Pánuco Gris. Los resultados han permitido, a su vez, proponer una cronología específica para este tipo cerámico, el cual, cabe decir, guarda estrecha relación con la cerámica Heavy Plain; esto con base en una innovación tecnológica y no únicamente por la inserción de técnicas decorativas, como tradicionalmente se hace. De la misma manera, se ha podido precisar la cronología de este tipo cerámico para finales de la fase Tantuán III (100 aC-200 dC) y principios de la fase Coy (200-650 dC), es decir, para algún momento entre el 150 y el 250 dC. Los resultados, a su vez, se han correlacionado con el hallazgo de otros materiales cerámicos que también son marcadores de la fase Coy, entre los cuales destacan materiales del Complejo Tancol, directamente asociados con las muestras presentadas en este estudio.

This report presents survey and excavation results from the site of Río Chico, located near the city of Puyo, Ecuador. Currently, Río Chico is the oldest multicomponent village-type mound site of the Pastaza drainage, one of the great rivers of the Amazon basin. It is part of a series of monumental sites in the Upper Amazon of Ecuador but is unique in the area because of its evidence of consumption of certain plants and interregional trade.

The Tiwanaku civilization (around AD 500–1100) originated in the Bolivian altiplano of the south-central Andes and established agrarian colonies (AD 600–1100) in the Peruvian coastal valleys. Current dietary investigations at Tiwanaku colonial sites focus on maize, a coastal valley cultivar with ritual and political significance. Here, we examine Tiwanaku provincial foodways and ask to what degree the Tiwanaku settlers maintained their culinary and agrarian traditions as they migrated into the lower-altitude coastal valleys to farm the land. We analyze archaeobotanical remains from the Tiwanaku site of Cerro San Antonio (600 m asl) in the Locumba Valley and compare them to data from the Tiwanaku site in the altiplano and the Rio Muerto site in the Moquegua Valley during the period of state expansion. Our findings show high proportions of wild, weedy, and domesticated Amaranthaceae cultivars, suggesting that Tiwanaku colonists grew traditional high-valley (2,000–3,000 m asl) and altiplano (3,000–4,000 m asl) foods on the lowland frontier because of their established cultural dietary preferences and Amaranthaceae's ability to adapt to various agroclimatic and edaphic conditions.

Understanding the complex relationships among social identities, long-distance exchange, and migration has long been an important issue in archaeology. In the central Andes, archaeologists have grappled with these issues to understand highland–coastal interaction. We present a case study of these relationships in the coca-growing zone of the Moche Valley (chaupiyunga zone, 200–1,200 m asl) during the Early Intermediate period (400 BC–AD 600). We focus on reconstructing the social identities of the people who lived at Cerro León, a large hill town situated astride an important access route into the chaupiyunga from the highlands. Unlike most sites in the chaupiyunga, the site is dominated by highland-style pottery. Petrographic analysis indicates that the sources of the highland-style pottery were in the adjacent highlands. Our analysis of daily domestic activities, vernacular architecture, personal adornment, and ritual practices, including burial practices, indicates that most of the residents of Cerro León were immigrants from the highlands. We argue that these immigrants produced and reproduced a distinctive highland (Culle) identity throughout the occupation of the site, which lasted 100 to 200 years. Evidence demonstrates that site residents had extensive exchange relationships with coastal Yunga communities in the lower and middle Moche Valley.

We present an AMS radiocarbon date from a bird image in a cave on the island of Hispaniola in the northern Caribbean. Borbón Cave No. 1 contains a key rock art assemblage that likely reflects a significant part of past native Taíno societies’ symbolic thought and beliefs. The grouping has already served to define one rock art style in the Antilles: the Borbón School. Our sample yielded a date of 890 ± 30 BP (1045–1225 cal AD). This result, as well as additional published dates for the region, confirms that these images were created before European contact with the region. Further dating comparison indicates that Taíno artistic traditions persisted for some years after the arrival and settlement of Spanish colonists on the island.

I thank my colleagues for their comments, but I disagree with their conclusions.

At times funerary practices do not end with the deposition of the corpses in their final resting place, because occasionally these supposedly definitive burials are disturbed later. When we can confirm that people were mainly responsible for these disturbances, even when other natural taphonomic factors are present, then we have a situation of anthropic postfunerary manipulation of bodies and graves. Some precontact sites in northeastern Brazil have mortuary contexts with “anomalies” in the deposition of bodies into their graves. Applying a taphonomy-based approach, we analyze these cases and compare them to other burials with similar characteristics from central-eastern Brazil in our discussion of the “alternative” phenomenon of postburial manipulation. The evidence suggests that the anthropic disturbance of older burials and corpses should be understood not as a random event, but as an integral and meaningful part of the mortuary practices of ancient inhabitants from across different regions of Brazil throughout the Holocene. With this work we highlight not only unusual mortuary patterns of precontact human groups in Brazil and South America but also the importance of a taphonomic approach to understanding the complexity and variability of funerary and postfunerary actions.

The nineteenth century was a dynamic period for hacienda workers on the south coast of Peru. Former Jesuit vineyards with two of the largest enslaved African-descended populations in rural coastal Peru—the haciendas of San Joseph (San José) and San Francisco Xavier (San Javier)—and their annexes in Nasca's Ingenio Valley underwent dramatic transformations with the replacement of their grapevines with cotton and the introduction of new types of workers. Cantonese indentured workers were contracted beginning in the 1830s, and the majority-enslaved workforce was legally emancipated in 1854. Seasonally, highland Andean workers joined the demographically shifting permanent hacienda population. We use evidence from excavated midden contexts at San Joseph, San Xavier, and San Joseph's annex of Hacienda La Ventilla to explore these changing agroindustrial dynamics and worker well-being in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite the transformations at the estates, we find that culinary practices developed by enslaved Africans and their descendants during the Jesuit administration, such as the preparation of one-pot meals and stews, continued into the republican era among Cantonese indentured laborers and wage workers of Indigenous, mestizo, and Cantonese origins. We argue that such strategies centered on foodways were a crucial aspect of worker self-care regimes and broader well-being.

In this study, we address interpersonal violence during the transition between the Middle and the Late Formative periods in the Central Andes, a critical period of political disintegration, hypothesized population pressure, and reorganization of the belief systems that is poorly known from a bioarchaeological viewpoint. Our objective is to understand the nature of the violence and associated factors in this context based on a detailed description of skeletal trauma in 67 well-preserved individuals (20 adolescents and adults and 47 subadults) recovered from Quebrada Chupacigarro cemetery (500–400 BC); this site is located in the middle valley of Supe on the Peruvian north-central coast. To detect patterns and potential causes, we registered the prevalence of traumatic injury according to age, sex, anatomic location, mechanisms (blunt, sharp, mixed, etc.), timing (antemortem or perimortem), and manner (inflicted or accidental). The results show a high prevalence of fractures in the whole population, but especially in adolescents and adults. Eighty percent of the adolescents and adults perished due to the intentional trauma and show patterns that suggest repetitive episodes of interpersonal violence. Perimortem injuries in the skull, face, and thorax are compatible with lethal interpersonal violence. The findings support a probable scenario of intercommunity violence in the middle valley of Supe around 500–400 BC.

En la subcuenca de Magdalena en el estado de Jalisco, los pueblos asentados en las inmediaciones del lago aprovecharon los recursos disponibles para la producción artesanal de bienes útiles y suntuarios. La presencia del Volcán de Tequila, el Lago de Magdalena y el sistema Lerma-Chapala-Santiago, facilitaron el acceso a recursos y la movilidad de productos para su distribución. En el centro del cuerpo acuífero fósil se eleva Atitlán, isla que resguarda evidencia de actividades de producción que se relacionaron con el aprovechamiento de recursos minerales y acuáticos por lo menos a partir del año 450 dC y hasta el 1500 dC. Dentro de las evidencias estudiadas sistemáticamente a nivel de superficie, es de nuestro interés una acumulación de objetos de obsidiana que se extiende en un área de 56.400 m2. El análisis espacial de distribución, junto con los de morfología, desgaste y microscopía aplicada a la identificación de huellas de uso, nos permiten explicar que se trató de un espacio de producción especializado de instrumentos de obsidiana mediante la técnica de talla, los cuales fueron empleados para el aprovechamiento de recursos perecederos.

Las enfermedades infecciosas fueron señaladas como la causa principal de muerte en las sociedades pasadas. Sin embargo, hasta el momento son escasos los conocimientos acerca del modo en que afectaron a las poblaciones humanas del sur de Sudamérica. El objetivo de este trabajo es estudiar el impacto que las enfermedades infecciosas tuvieron sobre las poblaciones de cazadores-recolectores que habitaron Patagonia Austral, a partir de la identificación, descripción e interpretación de lesiones óseas en restos humanos del Holoceno medio y tardío (aproximadamente 5200-100 años aP). Se analizaron macroscópicamente 54 individuos hallados en 50 sitios arqueológicos, sobre los cuales se describieron presencia, localización, lateralidad, tipo de formación de hueso nuevo (woven, lamelar, mixto) y distribución de las lesiones óseas. Se registraron lesiones diagnósticas y altamente compatibles con infecciones óseas en ocho (14,8%) individuos (sin diferencias entre sexos y edades), seis de los cuales (75,0%) provienen del sur de Tierra del Fuego. Cuatro individuos presentaron lesiones compatibles con osteomielitis y dos con tuberculosis (un no-adulto y un adulto). Esto último representa un hallazgo relevante para discutir la presencia de tuberculosis en poblaciones pasadas y su evolución en América. Los resultados presentados sugieren además que las evidencias de procesos infecciosos pueden ser recurrentes en análisis específicos sobre muestras esqueletales de cazadores-recolectores.